


growth, decay, transformation

by quentintarrantino



Category: Sons of Anarchy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-06
Updated: 2013-11-06
Packaged: 2017-12-31 17:06:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1034177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quentintarrantino/pseuds/quentintarrantino
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you live among demons soon you will awake with them in your heart. Lines begin to ebb and bend and what you think are your limits are tested to find that they are no longer there. This life has a side with shadows that stretch miles, but if she’s one thing she’s a survivor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	growth, decay, transformation

**Author's Note:**

> a fic for my favorite women of SoA and their characters and how alike and dissimilar they are

Snow was beautiful.

It was pure and white and crisp and when it fell out of the sky in winter of 1986 she felt like it was trying to scrub their sins away, standing in the parking lot to the auto shop, arms outstretched like some kind of martyr waiting for Christ’s second coming.

The night was cold and John was gone, Jax was asleep in the clubhouse with his little body bundled tight. She grew restless, always had, her bones ached when they remained rooted to one place too long and so she busied herself walking with her boots tapping against the cold asphalt. In the quiet hours of the morning she hummed to herself and felt the fat flakes soak her hair, the black locks that tumbled down her shoulders and blended in with the dark of the leather jacket that was not her own. Her jeans too tight and her face fresh from what last spurts of youth it had left before giving into the harsh decay of age.

In the dark of the night when she thought she was alone there was someone watching her, someone wearing a jacket with the reaper sewed haphazardly onto the back. He had a beer in his hand and his brow was furrowed in his gruff way. “Whatcha doin’.” He asked her, voice sounding much louder than intended.

This removed from reality who would’ve been able to tell her the consequences as she leaned back on the railing with the fluorescent sign illuminating his head like a halo. Her fallen angel bound for a life of misfortune and sin. “Thought it would’ve been a crime not to enjoy the snow before the sun rises and it all melts.” She replied, the distance between them pleading innocence.

He smiled at her, the way he smiled at the hookers that drifted in and out of the clubhouse. He smiled like she wasn’t somebody’s old lady. “What song were you singing to yourself?”

He knew the answer, she knew he did. With her husband far away in a nameless place, riding on his bike through the snow and her son slumbering inside she tilted her chin up to the black night sky and exhaled, watching her breathe rise as the singsong lilt was lost to the air. “ _But I was young and foolish and some rider led me astray.”_

Clay Morrow smirked.

\--

He was riding bikes before he could walk. The girls at school watched him with envy and lust and he puffed his chest out with pride and arrogance when he took his helmet off. The Prince of Charming, coming of age to claim what was his.

She was the only one who hadn’t been impressed at all, watching him with narrowed eyes like he’d have to try harder than that if he wanted to keep her attention. Turning her back to him, saying no and pushing his hands away when he tried to catch her around her waist. Jax Teller might’ve been a prince but Tara was a queen and her presence commanded a power that only a certain brand of woman held. The kind that made lesser men cower when his mother entered a room, the fire burning bright behind her eyes and Tara Knowles had it, the definitive trait that made an old lady.

The first time he kissed her it felt like his soul was searing a hole right through his chest, she must’ve felt it too because when they broke apart she looked at him with eyes so wide they might fall out of her head and she traced her fingers against the cut on his back, the embroidered lettering. Its jagged stitching stretched all the way into the core of who he was.

“I love you.” He would eventually tell her.

“You don’t know what you’re saying.” She would quietly reply. Her mouth tasted like razor blades, her fingernails digging into his skin like knives.

Some people were born for a certain life. Tara Knowles was created to hurl his mother off her throne, to climb atop the world and watch them kill themselves in the name of a club that would wither and die like a leaf in fall. Anarchy was buried deep inside and he saw it waiting to take hold.

\--

When there’s nothing left for you on this earth there is your family. Your children are your legacy, and you are to guide them in the path you’ve painstakingly created for them. Gemma gave her son a kingdom, she paved the road for him to pick up his crown when it was his time and he could lead just like his father before him.

Everything she did was for him, when John grew weak and troubled she saw that the delicate balance was in danger and sending him out onto that road with a damaged bike was a hard thing but it ensured her son’s future. She was a statue, standing tall against the beating waves of time and tribulation and Clay was the cliff that held fast and supported her. She gave Jax a father who could lead when his real one could not.

Winter of 1986 was the death of Gemma Teller, the quiet wife who did what she was told. Anarchy stretched its weary wings and took flight, setting everything it its path aflame as it went.

“I love you.” Rumbled the man who had murdered her husband, his hands tangling in hers.

Gemma Morrow kissed him and felt whole. “You don’t know what you’re saying.” She replied quietly.

\--

When you live among demons soon you will awake with them in your heart. Lines begin to ebb and bend and what you think are your limits are tested to find that they are no longer there. This life has a side with shadows that stretch miles, but if she’s one thing she’s a survivor. 

Snakes lay hidden where you think you’re safe and it’s not the men you need fear, but the women who stand behind them, for they hold the true power. Climbing atop the pile of bodies was a ruthless struggle, casting down the queen was a challenge all itself but once she placed the crown upon her head and surveyed her kingdom seeds of despair were planted.

“You and I are just the same.” Gemma hisses, both their eyes tired from all that they’ve been forced to see. Their shoulders heavy with the burden of a thousand sins.

Abel and Thomas play with their toy motorcycles, talking about their fearless father who rides through the night and wears a smooth leather cut with a reaper on it. They say that they can’t wait for their turn, just like grandma and daddy promise them.

Gemma gave her son a kingdom, Tara will give her sons a future.

\--

When her baby dies the sky is clear and the weather is sticky and hot. John is gone, playing house with a woman whose name she’s never heard across the ocean while his son rots in a box in the ground. He’s grown tired of her and has moved on to the next naïve girl who is taken with his pretty bike and moody tendencies. She sits for three days in his room, the internal spark that had kept her moving forward for so long vanished, this life grinding her down to nothing.

When John didn’t come, Clay did.

Standing in the doorway to her Thomas’s room, shoulders filling up the doorway. Jax was screaming for a mother that was too heavy with grief to move from her seat, his anguish only fueling her melancholy. Gemma never cried, it wasn’t her way, it was weakness and in this life you couldn’t show weakness, but tears left thick tracks across her face. Her brain was cloudy and through the fog of her completely defeat she saw Clay standing beside her with Jackson in his arms, placated and his calloused hand wiping her tears away and telling her in his rough deep voice that rumbled the very foundations of her life that she was too strong for this, that she would endure. If she was nothing else, she was a survivor.

He held her as her shoulders heaved and he absorbed every sob and exuded nothing but acceptance and love, comfort and sadness that this had to have happened. His arms wrapped around her so tight she feared that when she tried to pull away she would be unable to, that he would have engulfed her entirely.

She never did quite manage to pull away.

\--

They were just alike, she mused as she packed her sons up in the dead of night and buckled them into their car seats, bags in the back of the car and their heads dropping drowsily. There was nothing they would not do for their family.

Jax was gone, riding steadily through the pitch black and soon she would be too. Abel rubbed his face and sighed in his sleep, a song was playing on the radio that reminded her of days that had since passed.

_But I was young and foolish and some rider led me astray_

Tara Knowles turned off the radio and pulled out of the driveway into the endless night, throwing her crown away and setting the kingdom on fire. Thirty miles away Gemma Morrow was dreaming of winter in 1986.


End file.
